A recent blog post by Kristin Halsey, considering the importance and relevance of empathy in higher education, included a number of useful and inspiring resources related to this topic. One of them, an article entitled Five Easy Ideas that Build Bridges to Your Online Learners, comes from Faculty Focus, a blog published three times a week on “what’s working and what’s not” in the higher education classroom, both in person and online. The blogs focus on a variety of topics including teaching strategies, teaching with technology, and blended and flipped learning to name just a few. They’ve also started offering a podcast that’s only 10-12 minutes, relatively easy to fit into a busy schedule.

I’ve only just started exploring their blogs, but what has stood out to me is how practical they are. Each of the blogs I’ve read so far has offered specific suggestions or strategies that can be applied directly to my course or classroom (or for me this semester, the virtual classroom).

Here are a few examples:

Under the topic Effective Teaching Strategies, “Classroom Activities Throughout the Semester”

• Using 1-minute papers at the end of class based on Rosen’s (2016) “Muddiest point” or questions inspired by Lang’s (2016) “Small Changes in Teaching: Making Connections” (also accessible through Principia’s subscription).
  • Was there a position taken in today’s class that you strongly disagreed with?
  • What did you learn today that you might apply after graduating?
  • Identify a television show, film, or book that illustrates a course concept discussed today.

• Student “mini-lectures” (7 minutes or less)
  • Student volunteers “share an interesting angle on a course theme, recognizing that students may have relevant knowledge and experiences from travel, internships, family histories, or other sources.”  
  • The author reports that students appreciate learning new information from other students.

Under Teaching with Technology, “A Video-based Exit Ticket Sparks Engagement”

• Having students create a video “Exit card.” In a statistics class, students were given a problem to solve as a group and asked to create a video explaining how they solved the problem. 
• The author reports, “Not only was it helpful for me to hear students discuss how they approached the problem they were given to solve but hearing their voice inflections and tone provided much more than any written solution ever has in my 25 years of teaching! The video creation became a multi-voiced classroom narrative tool for metacognition.”

Under Education Assessment, “Good Questions for Better Essay Prompts (and Papers)”

• 8 questions to ask yourself (as well as links to additional sources). For example:
  • What does good writing look like in your field? How can you convey this to students?
  • Do you want to read their papers?
  • Are your grading criteria clear—and thoughtful and reasonable?
  • How can you go through the writing process yourself to create the most productive possible prompt?

And under Online Course Design and Preparation, “What Students Want: A Simple, Navigable LMS Course Design”—as shared in a recent Faculty Learning Community (recording here)—tips on keeping your Canvas course “simple and navigable.”

• An example of organizing your course by modules including a “welcome module”

See which topics and blog posts speak to your teaching practice and consider sharing here how you use and adapt these ideas in your own classroom, whether in-person or virtual.